Email Marketing Software Comparison: IGSendMail vs the Competition

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the default answer when someone asks which email marketing tool to start with, and its onboarding earns that. The drag-and-drop email builder and template library are strong, marketing automation is capable on the middle tiers, and the free plan gives you 500 contacts with Mailchimp branding in every message. The cost is its pricing model: you pay per contact, so a growing email list raises your bill whether or not those addresses ever open anything, and monthly sends are capped at a multiple of your contact tier. Around 10,000 contacts it runs about $100 a month for roughly 100,000 sends.

Full Mailchimp vs IGSendMail comparison →

Brevo

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) combines email marketing, SMS marketing and a light CRM, and it is one of the few platforms that does not charge per contact — you pay for sends. That makes it attractive for large lists that are emailed infrequently. The catch is the daily sending limit on lower tiers, which makes a large one-off campaign awkward, and the way features arrive as separate add-ons. At 10,000 contacts it is around $59 a month for roughly 20,000 sends.

Full Brevo vs IGSendMail comparison →

MailerLite

MailerLite is the tidiest email editor in this comparison and a genuinely generous free plan sits underneath it. For a newsletter, a simple welcome email sequence and a landing page, it is hard to beat on ease of use. It caps out as a business grows: automation is basic next to ActiveCampaign, reporting is thin, and white-label sending is reserved for the top tier. Around $73 a month at 10,000 contacts, with unlimited sends.

Full MailerLite vs IGSendMail comparison →

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the incumbent for small businesses that have been sending email for a decade, with strong phone support and event tools that nothing else here matches. The interface shows its age, the automation builder is limited, and pricing is contact-based and high — about $110 a month at 10,000 contacts. It is usually chosen for the support rather than the software.

Full Constant Contact vs IGSendMail comparison →

Kit (ConvertKit)

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is built for creators — newsletters, courses, paid subscriptions — and its tagging model suits people who sell to an audience rather than a customer list. Unlimited sends, clean automation sequences, and commerce features built in. It is a poor fit for ecommerce, and it is expensive per contact at scale: roughly $119 a month at 10,000 subscribers.

Full Kit (ConvertKit) vs IGSendMail comparison →

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has the most capable marketing automation platform in this comparison by some distance — conditional branching, lead scoring, a real CRM, and a visual builder that can express workflows the others cannot. That power costs money and time: around $174 a month at 10,000 contacts, sends capped at a multiple of your tier, and a learning curve that means most small teams use a fraction of it.

Full ActiveCampaign vs IGSendMail comparison →

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is the ecommerce specialist. Its integrations with Shopify and similar platforms are deep, the revenue attribution is detailed, and its predictive analytics genuinely work on a large store's data. It is priced accordingly — roughly $150 a month at 10,000 contacts — and if you are not selling products online you are paying for machinery you will never run.

Full Klaviyo vs IGSendMail comparison →

Campaigner

Campaigner is an established email marketing service with solid deliverability, A/B testing and a reasonable send allowance at around $89 a month for 10,000 contacts. The interface is dated, the integration list is short compared with the rest of this comparison, and the email editor feels a generation behind. It suits senders who want volume without paying enterprise prices.

Full Campaigner vs IGSendMail comparison →

Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns makes sense almost entirely as part of the wider Zoho suite. If your sales and marketing already run on Zoho CRM, the connection between contacts, deals and email campaigns is seamless and inexpensive — about $57 a month at 10,000 contacts with unlimited sends. Used on its own, the email editor and automation are noticeably weaker than the alternatives.

Full Zoho Campaigns vs IGSendMail comparison →

Omnisend

Omnisend is an ecommerce platform for email and SMS marketing, with pre-built flows for abandoned cart, welcome and post-purchase that work out of the box. Its automation is easier to start with than Klaviyo's and less deep. Pricing has risen steadily and sits around $132 a month at 10,000 contacts, which is a lot for a store that mainly needs the standard flows.

Full Omnisend vs IGSendMail comparison →

HubSpot

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a CRM with email marketing attached rather than the other way round, and if you are buying the whole platform — sales, marketing and CRM in one — the email is a reasonable part of it. As an email marketing tool bought on its own it is the most expensive option here by a wide margin, roughly $400 a month at 10,000 contacts, and much of what you pay for lives outside email.

Full HubSpot vs IGSendMail comparison →

SendGrid

SendGrid is a transactional email delivery service first: an API and an SMTP relay for receipts, password resets and notifications, with marketing campaigns bolted on. The API is excellent and the marketing side is basic. It also retired its long-standing free tier, which removed the main reason many small senders chose it. Around $60 a month at 10,000 contacts.

Full SendGrid vs IGSendMail comparison →

How to actually compare email marketing software

Most email marketing software comparisons rank tools on feature count, which is the least useful axis available. Every platform in this category has a drag-and-drop editor, a template library, segmentation, signup forms, automation workflows and reporting. Feature parity is close enough that a checklist will not separate them, and a comparison built on one tells you which vendor filled in the most boxes rather than which tool will suit you.

Four things actually differ, and they are the four worth checking on any comparison you read, including this one.

First, what you are billed for. Contact-based pricing charges for every address you store, so a list that grows is a bill that grows whether or not the new addresses ever buy anything. Send-based pricing charges for what you send. The difference is small at 1,000 contacts and decisive at 50,000, because one number is indexed to your list size and the other is not. Run your own numbers at the size you expect to be in a year, not the size you are now.

Second, what sits behind a higher tier. Almost every platform in this market distributes its useful features up the plan ladder — click heatmaps, phone support, white-label sending. The entry price tells you very little; the price of the plan that includes the three things you actually need tells you everything.

Third, whether send volume is capped and how. Several platforms cap monthly sends at a multiple of your contact tier, which is fine for one newsletter a week and stops being fine the moment you run a newsletter, an abandoned-cart flow, a post-purchase sequence and a re-engagement campaign at once. That is what an email programme looks like when it is working, so a send cap is a ceiling on how well you are allowed to do.

Fourth, deliverability support. Every vendor claims high inbox placement and the claim is close to meaningless in isolation, because placement depends far more on your list and your sending behaviour than on the platform. What differs is whether authentication is set up for you, whether anyone helps you warm a new domain, and whether you can see a placement problem before your revenue does.

The questions that decide it faster than a feature table

Will my bill rise if my list grows but my sending does not? On contact-based pricing, yes. This single question resolves most of the cost difference between platforms at scale, and it is the one people discover the answer to eighteen months in.

What is the send limit on the plan I would actually be on? Then multiply your list size by the number of emails a month a real programme sends — a weekly broadcast plus three or four automated flows firing per person. Many people discover their intended plan does not cover their intended programme.

Which of the features I care about are on the entry plan? Write down your three must-haves before you look at any pricing page, then find the cheapest plan on each platform that includes all three. That is the honest price comparison, and it frequently reorders the ranking.

What happens to my transactional email? Receipts and password resets must never fail. Whether they run through the same account and the same authenticated domain, or through a separate add-on with separate billing, is a decision with deliverability consequences rather than a convenience detail.

How hard is it to leave? Contact export is universal. Template export is not, and automation logic never transfers, because no two platforms model triggers identically. A vendor that makes leaving hard is telling you something about how it expects to keep you.

Where the comparisons on this page come from

Every competitor page here uses the same structure: the published list price at each subscriber tier, the monthly send allowance at that tier, and a feature row set that is identical across all of them so the pages are comparable with each other rather than each flattering a different angle.

Prices change, and competitors do not announce it. The figures here are checked periodically against each vendor's own public pricing page, and the calculator on each page takes your real list size rather than assuming a tier. Before you decide, open both pricing pages yourself — ours and theirs — and confirm the numbers still hold. Any comparison page that asks you to take its pricing on trust, this one included, is asking for more than it should.

We also do not claim the competitor is bad. Mailchimp is where most people learn email marketing and its onboarding is genuinely good; Klaviyo's ecommerce depth is real; ActiveCampaign's automation builder is more capable than ours in specific ways. The case for switching is about pricing structure and what is included at the price you would actually pay, and if that case does not apply to you, switching is work for no gain.

Free plans, free trials, and the difference that matters

Almost every email marketing platform advertises something free, and the word covers two completely different things. A free trial gives you the paid product for a fixed period and then stops. A free plan is a permanent tier you can run a small business on indefinitely. When you are choosing a tool, that distinction decides whether you are evaluating software or committing to it.

Among the platforms compared here, MailerLite, Brevo, Kit, Zoho Campaigns, HubSpot and IGSendMail all operate a genuine free plan. Klaviyo runs a small free tier aimed at new stores. ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact and Campaigner are trial-only, so the free period is an evaluation rather than a starting point. SendGrid retired the long-standing free tier that made it the default choice for small transactional senders.

Then check three things about any free plan, because this is where they differ most. What is the cap on — contacts, monthly sends, or a daily sending limit? A daily limit is the most restrictive and the least advertised, because it makes a single large email campaign impossible regardless of your monthly allowance. Does the vendor put its own branding in your footer? Most do, and on a newsletter that goes to customers it reads as exactly what it is. And which features are withheld — automation and the drag-and-drop email builder are commonly reserved for paid tiers, which means the free plan cannot demonstrate the thing you are actually evaluating.

IGSendMail's free plan covers 2,500 contacts and 3,000 emails a month, with the full email editor and template library, no credit card and no branding in your footer. It is capped on sends rather than contacts, so growing your email list does not push you onto a paid plan — only sending more does. Exact free-plan allowances change across this whole market without announcement, so confirm the current figures on each vendor's own pricing page before you commit.

Match the tool to how you actually work

The last filter is the one a feature table cannot apply for you: what kind of sender are you?

If you run an ecommerce store, pre-built flows for abandoned cart, welcome and post-purchase are the features that pay for themselves, which points at Klaviyo, Omnisend or IGSendMail depending on how much depth you need against what you want to spend.

If you need complex conditional logic — branching on behaviour, lead scoring, a real CRM alongside your email marketing automation — ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are the two that genuinely deliver it, at prices that reflect that.

If you are a creator selling to an audience, Kit's tagging and commerce model fits the way you work better than a contact-list model does.

If your priority is a simple email newsletter, a welcome email sequence and a contact list you are not billed for, the decision comes down to pricing structure and what the free plan includes — which is where MailerLite, Brevo and IGSendMail compete most directly.

And if you send transactional email as well as marketing, check whether both run through one authenticated domain or through two separate products with separate billing. That is a deliverability decision rather than a convenience one, because sender reputation accrues to the domain doing the sending.